Every December I reread Erich Kästner’s Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom). It’s a Christmas novel set in a boarding school (an Internat in German). It has some of the elements that later showed up in Harry Potter: feuding groups of students, strong friendships, wise faculty members and some who are less wise, and efforts by students to overcome their limitations. Boarding school stories have been popular for a long time.
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